The Power of Darkness

About

Tolstoy wrote The Power of Darkness in 1886 as a deliberate provocation: a peasant-world naturalist tragedy that spares nothing in its portrait of adultery, murder, and infanticide among Russian serfs. It was initially banned by Russian censorship, premiered in Paris (where Zola praised it), and not performed in Russia until 1895. The play uses the naturalist form with a ferocity that makes Ibsen seem restrained: the climax, in which the murderer Nikita confesses his crimes at his daughter's wedding, is one of the most devastating scenes in late-nineteenth-century drama. Tolstoy's moral didacticism here serves genuinely tragic ends.